


Sanctuary

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [324]
Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1940s, Alternate Universe - Academia, Angst, Bottom Anakin Skywalker, Bottom Obi-Wan Kenobi, Brief Discussion of War Trauma, Dirty Talk, Feelings Realization, For Crying Out Loud, Graduate Student!Obi-Wan, Hurt/Comfort, Infidelity, Lack of Communication, M/M, Penetrative Sex, Please Will You Just Talk To Each Other, Professor!Jinn, Schmoop, Top Anakin Skywalker, Top Qui-Gon Jinn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-01-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:14:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 15,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22184656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: A stranger knocks on Professor Jinn's door. Obi-Wan is there to answer.
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker, Qui-Gon Jinn/Anakin Skywalker, Qui-Gon Jinn/Obi-Wan Kenobi
Series: Mental Mimosa [324]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1012767
Comments: 102
Kudos: 256





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: i thought you were my new roommate’s boyfriend so i casually invited you in but you’re actually the RA of the dorm and now you think i want to have sex with you. Prompt from this [generator](https://colormayfade.tumblr.com/generator).
> 
> How we got from that prompt to this fic, I do not know.
> 
> **And if you are new to the MM series: a) welcome! and b) please take a moment to read about how the series works[here](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1012767).**

The stranger at the door was terribly attractive. Dark, messy hair, a stupidly fetching scar, and a face that was more boy than man and if Obi-Wan had been sort of person who favored italics--which, of course, he wasn’t--then he might have gone so far to as categorize the person at the door as a _fox_. It was rather alarming.

So it was in pure self-defense, then, that what came out of Obi-Wan's mouth was clipped and not at all welcoming:

“May I help you?”

“Er,” said stranger said. “Hi. I’m here to see Dr. Jinn. Is he in?”

“No.” He kept the same icy tone; all the better to hide his very silly disappointment. Of course this enchanting creature wasn’t calling for him. “Professor Jinn’s on sabbatical. He won’t be back from Crete until the fall.”

“Oh.” The kid stood up a little straighter and scrubbed a hand through his curls. “But this is his house?”

“Yes.”

The guy tilted his head. “So you live here, too?”

“While he’s gone I do, yes.” Obi-Wan did his best not to flinch. Damn it, he shouldn’t have said that. What if the man were a prowler testing out some bold new knock-on-the-front-door-and-look-beautiful strategy? Whose else knocked on the door at eight o’clock in the evening one night in the middle of May? “But I can’t say that I see what business that is of yours, Mister--?”

“Skywalker!” the kid ejaculated. The words started to come out in a rush. “I’m Anakin Skywalker. I was in one of Dr. Jinn’s seminars at the University of Chicago last summer and he told me that if I was ever in Boston, I should stop by his house and he’d put me up and so, er”--a hopeful sort of smile--”here I am.”

Obi-Wan was sorely tempted to bang his forehead into the doorframe. He did not. 

“I see,” he said evenly, because it all made bloody sense now. “So you’re another of Qui-Gon’s strays.”  
  


***  
  


If there was one rule that was sacrosanct in Qui-Gon Jinn’s life--and by proxy, in the lives of his graduate students--it was what the professor, in his more expansive moments, called the Rule of Sanctuary.

“It is my philosophy,” he’d told Obi-Wan the first time Obi-Wan had seen him drunk, “that we have an obligation as living, breathing beings to offer care for all other beings that live and breathe in their times of need.”

“Is breathing a requirement?” Obi-Wan had asked tartly; he’d been more than halfway to sloshed. “The actual in and out of air, I mean. Does this notion apply only to beings who have lungs?”

A chuckle, a shift on the stone bench behind him. “No, no specific organs are required.”

“Well, then. Perhaps you should just say living beings all and be done with it, eh?”

Qui-Gon had laughed and passed down the brandy. “Fair enough.”

They’d been sitting in the garden at the end of a long, happy evening. The semester was over and before them sat three months of no classes, no teaching, of research and reading and oh, god, after the undergraduate terrors Obi-Wan had had in his section this term, the break ahead was akin to heaven. There’d been a half dozen graduate students there for dinner and at least as many profs, but they’d faded away, one by one, hollering jokes back down the hall as they made their way with Qui-Gon’s good cigars out through the front door.

Now, only Obi-Wan lingered, and rather than awkward, it had felt rather good to be alone with his professor, his mentor, the man he’d come to know over the past remarkable year. That he had been admitted to Harvard at all still took Obi-Wan aback; that Dr. Jinn himself had taken him on, all the more so--never mind that Jinn and one of his dons at Oxford were great friends. But on that night, seated in the grass in Qui-Gon’s garden, he’d reminded himself that what was most remarkable, really, was that the war was over and he was still alive and when you got down to it, the life that lay before him was, as his gran would say, gravy.

“So this obligation,” Obi-Wan had said, “to care for all these goddamn beings. That’s why you have so many cats. And plants. And rooms that are made up for guests.”

The professor stretched out his fingers to meet the silky tail of one such beast as she ambled by. “Yes.”

“But doesn’t it bother you that people think you’re an easy touch? Some people call you a sucker.”

“My boy,” Qui-Gon had said, “I teach the ways of Greece in a world that’s gone mad to men like you who’ve already seen too much of war. The words of the ancients are a prophecy of our worst as a species, and our best; and I wonder, Obi-Wan, if there’s room in Harry Truman’s America for anyone to care about that.”

He’d reached out and stroked Obi-Wan’s hair as he had the cat’s and Obi-Wan had leaned his head back and seen his professor looking terribly, terribly sad.

“Professor?”

“You were in France, weren’t you? During the war. I seem to remember you saying that.”

Obi-Wan had flushed; it was not a subject he favored, and Qui-Gon knew that. “I was. In the desert first, when I first got in, and then a long time in the Ardennes.”

“I was there, too, in the Great War.”

“The Ardennes?”

The professor’s thumb swept Obi-Wan’s temple. “No. Some godforsaken field dug into the heart of France. A place that was beautiful once, probably, but not so at any time I was there. I wonder...I wonder if the the trees have regrown. If there are flowers there again, and bees, and birds. Or if what had begun to grown has, in this last conflagration, been already struck down.”

It had been the grief in Qui-Gon’s voice that had spurred Obi-Wan to madness, that had driven him to rise to his knees and pitch forward in the dark and press their mouths together and at Qui-Gon’s soft, startled response, to clutch his arms and press on until the professor’s fingers were cupping the back of his neck and they were breathing together and finding bare skin under the stars’ warm, unblinking eyes.

“Oh, my dear,” Qui-Gon had murmured over the smell of hyacinths as passion drew nearer, as he swelled hot in Obi-Wan’s mouth. “My dear, you don’t have to do that, you don’t have to, you can…”

But Obi-Wan, spurred on by the bourbon and a loss of all sense, had held fast to his professor’s bared thighs and increased his ardor until Qui-Gon’s hands had tightened in his hair and that great, deep voice had rung out far too loudly to be proper and then Qui-Gon was filling him, deep and bitter and sweet, until Obi-Wan could swallow no more.

“You need to be cared for,” he’d whispered later, when they were in bed, when Qui-Gon’s big fingers were inside him and there was only pink smoke in his head. “You need to be looked after, too, Qui-Gon. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Mmmm.” Qui-Gon had nuzzled his cheek. “That’s not your responsibility, Obi-Wan.”

He’d bowed his back, growing frantic; all the more so when Qui-Gon spread his fingers. “I know it’s not,” he muttered against that broad, soft mouth, parted now in a smile. “I know, I know, I know. But, God, please--I want to.”

And he was doing that now, he told himself as he led the kid and his swollen knapsack--how on earth had he missed that?--through the front hall and down towards the kitchen, caring for Qui-Gon, albeit in a roundabout way. If the professor had given his word to this lanky, inconsiderate boy, then there was naught for Obi-Wan to do than honor it, even if Qui-Gon himself were thousands of miles away.

Ah, he thought, for a soft, fleeting second: the silly things we do for love.

“I suppose they don’t have telephones in Chicago,” he said aloud, arch.

The kid cleared his throat. “You mean I should’ve called.”

“Or written. I’m told there’s a marvellous new invention called stamps.”

They swept past the dining room, where, in the collective memory of Professor Jinn’s graduate assistants, no meal had ever actually been ete; the last time the top of the table had been spotted beneath the Mount Vesuvius of paper, legend had it, was 1933. 

“It was a last-minute thing,” Anakin said defensively as they passed the library--although every room in the house could have been accurately labeled thus. “I didn’t have time to mail a letter.”

“And then again,” Obi-Wan said, “per my previous point: the phone. So.”

He led Anakin the last few steps into the most lived-in part of the house--a great, bright space that ran the back of the property, a kitchen and sort-of sitting room rolled into one. One wall was lined with windows that looked out on Qui-Gon’s small, neat garden, and at this time of day, as the sun’s grip slipped in the west, the room sang with the last of her light.

Anakin whistled and set his bag down with a thump. “Wow.”


	2. Chapter 2

“Indeed. Would you care for some tea?”

“Tea?” Anakin repeated. He had a wee dazed grin on his face. “I mean, sure, but. _Wow_.”

“Open any book you like,” Obi-Wan said, repeating the little speech Qui-Gon was wont to give to new visitors. “Touch any plant you like, unless it has thorns. And nothing in here is breakable--except you, should you bother the cats.”

Anakin’s eyes were everywhere at once: on the ancient oriental rugs, on the neat but bulging bookshelves, on the neat army of green that lined the windows, broken only by the back door, and he looked, Obi-Wan thought, rather like a child who’d unexpectedly wandered into Christmas.

“It’s beautiful,” Anakin said softly, almost reverent. 

“Yes,” Obi-Wan said, because it was; sometimes, especially with Qui-Gon gone, it was easy to forget that. 

For a moment, he imagined he could feel Qui-Gon’s arm around his waist, his mouth warm with wine or fresh coffee nuzzling the back of Obi-Wan’s hair like he did when he’d been up all night writing, caught in the storm of his thoughts. It had happened more and more often as the time had drawn near for his trip.

“I missed you last night.”

“Mmm.” A sleepy mumble, and one arm had been joined by the other, holding him fast. “Made some progress. Not as much as I should have, but some.”

“Good. Are you hungry? There’s some bacon left, and I could scramble an egg for you before I go.”

Qui-Gon breathing hard against his neck, his hips telling a story that his tired mouth couldn’t quite. “Come to bed.”

He’d had his tie on, for God’s sake; he’d had his tie on and he’d been holding the last of his tea and he should already have been out the front door. “I have lecture in an hour. Your lecture, might I add, since Professor Jinn is off his feed today. Down with a cold. Or so I’ve heard.”

A close of teeth above his collar and a low, delicious grunt. “ _Bed_ , Obi-Wan.”

If Qui-Gon got him up the stairs, he’d never come down, waiting undergraduates be damned. “No,” he’d said, digging his nails into Qui-Gon’s wrist. “You need it that badly? Take it here.”

“Don’t need _it_ ,” Qui-Gon had hissed when he at last slammed inside, when Obi-Wan was clutching the back of the battered sofa as the world came to life right outside. “Oh, gods, fuck, yes, my dear one. I need you.”

Later, he’d stood at the front of the lecture hall in a clean shirt and a different tie and taught from Qui-Gon’s faded notes while his body still vibrated with the soft steel of Qui-Gon’s big, hungry body and the dull, pretty ache left in its wake.

“Stay home,” Qui-Gon had whispered, his hands still curled over Obi-Wan’s bare hips, the words a hot scratch at his neck. “Stay with me today, please. I’ve missed you. I’ve missed feeling you come like that.”

“I can’t, darling.”

“Hmph. Yes, you can. I’m cancelling class.”

“Qui-Gon.”

A sigh. “Obi-Wan.”

He’d looked over his shoulder then and seen Qui-Gon at his most beautiful: eyes dark and sated, lips wet, his too-long hair disheveled and, in this light, more gray than brown.

“Now, now, professor,” Obi-Wan had said, “sometimes my presence--and yours, might I add--is required in the outside world. You can’t keep me here forever.”

There’d been a wave of sadness on Qui-Gon’s face then, or had there? Perhaps Obi-Wan had dreamed it. 

“Oh, dear one,” Qui-Gon had said, bending to kiss Obi-Wan’s shoulder. "That is one fact I can't help but know."

Gods, how he wished he’d stayed that day. Now that Qui-Gon was away, every part of Obi-Wan wanted nothing more than to see him again; to touch him, to reach for that craggy and sometimes absent-minded face and draw him into a kiss of the kind that got him teased for his eagerness until he reached for Qui-Gon’s fly, and then there was a different sort of teasing to be had, and--

“Sir?” 

Oh hell. Obi-Wan brought himself back to earth. “Ah, um, yes?”

Anakin, to his great relief, was not standing at his side watching him moon like a lovesick pup but was seated on the floor by the coffee table with one cat in his lap and another sniffing curiously at his arm. “If it’s not too much to ask," Anakin said, "may I have a sandwich with my tea?”

“Yes, of course. It was terribly rude of me not to offer.”

“Um, no, that’s ok, you didn’t have to--yes, hi, hello,” Anakin said to the thin orange cat who was now kneading urgently his elbow. “It’s ok, you can’t hurt it.”

“That’s Tría. She likes to stick her nose into things. And the fluffy one in your lap is Dýo. He’s a loud little beast when he’s not sleeping, and sometimes even then.”

“Huh?”

Obi-Wan chuckled. “He snores.”

“Oh.” The kid looked up at him and smiled. “And is it ok if I know your name? Can’t help but notice you’ve told me everybody’s but yours.”

“I have, haven’t I? Ah. Sorry.” He felt himself blush, for some damnable reason. ”I’m Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

Anakin’s eyes widened. He looked utterly delighted. “You’re Obi-Wan?”

“Er,” Obi-Wan said, “yes?”

“Of course you are! I should’ve guessed.” He tilted his head. “But in the picture Professor Jinn showed me, I don’t think you had a beard. That must be it.”

Obi-Wan felt rather dizzy. Qui-Gon had a picture of him? That was odd enough; Qui-Gon wasn't one for sentimentality. But that he'd carried it Chicago last summer and shown it to this stranger, this kid? That was downright bizarre. He felt the sudden, jarring need to sit down. But instead, he moved towards the stove and reached for the tea kettle, for the comfort of ritual. “Yes,” he said, drowning the word under the twist of the tap. “That must be it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me: I know exactly where this is going!  
> Muse: Ah ha ha--no you don't.
> 
> Thanks for indulging my meanderings here, folks.


	3. Chapter 3

Anakin worked his way through two cheese sandwiches and one and a half cups of tea without disturbing either of his self-appointed feline guardians. He talked as he ate, a little, telling Obi-Wan in broad terms about his mother, the small farm he’d grown up on that had been stripped by the Dust Bowl, and then worse.

“She died when I was ten,” he said matter-of-factly, though his expression was nothing like that at all. “And my aunt and uncle came--my dad’s brother--and took me to live with them in Chicago.”

Obi-Wan thought of his family back in Edinburgh, of how hard it had been to leave them when the war came--and he’d been not a child, but a young man. Ye gods. “That must have been quite a shock,” he said, setting his teacup on his knee. “Culturally, at the very least. Or had you been to the city before?”

A faded grin. “Nope, I’d never been beyond the limits of Eisley, Kansas, before Mom passed. Never even been in a car before, not like the one my uncle had, all new and chrome and everything. It was gorgeous. Spent the whole trip bugging the shit out of him asking 900 questions about it.” Anakin shook his head and munched the last of his crust. “By the time we hit the Illinois border, he was none too pleased with me. Which was a theme of things, it turned out. Pretty soon a day didn’t go by when we weren’t having it out.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t like me very much. Said I reminded him too much of my father, who’d also grinded his gears, apparently. I remember Mom telling me that he didn’t even come to the funeral.” He sighed, set his empty plate carefully aside and smoothed a hand through Dýo’s cottonball fur. “By the time I was 12 or 13, Obi-Wan, I tell ya, I don’t think he’d have come to mine.”

There was something so resigned in Anakin’s voice that it made Obi-Wan’s stomach turn. What the hell did one have to do to a child to make him so goddamn certain that you wouldn’t care if he lived or he died?

“Did he hurt you?” Obi-Wan asked as calmly as he could.

“Did he beat me up, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“He swatted me once or twice when I was little, maybe, but he only tried to hit me once, when I was 15.”

Obi-Wan raised an eyebrow. “Tried?”

Anakin chuckled, a sound with no mirth behind it. “Well, I was almost a foot taller and a hell of a lot stronger, so he swung and he missed and I didn’t. Put him on his back before he knew which way was up and was out the door before he could count his missing teeth.” He wriggled a little trying to stretch out his back and earned a golden-eyed glare from Tría. “Sorry, buddy. Long story short, I walked out that night and never went back. Been on my own since then.”

Good Lord. “Living where? Doing what?”

“In Chicago. Doing whatever I needed to.” He showed his teeth; he seemed amused by Obi-Wan’s discomfort. “Mostly legal stuff, don’t worry. I only ran numbers every once and a while, when pickings were slim.”

“Ah well,” Obi-Wan said dryly. “So long as you only did it then.”

Anakin laughed truly then; it made his whole face light up. “Believe me, I have no desire to spend my life in the pokey. Five years in my uncle’s house was jail enough for me.”

“I’m glad you got out.”

Their eyes met and Anakin smiled again. “Me, too.”

“But how on earth did you meet our Professor Jinn? Surely it’s a long way from being on your own at 15 to a select seminar at the University of Chicago.”

The kid’s cheeks went cherry pink, even under his scar, and he looked, for the first time all evening, a bit uneasy. “Well, er--I’m--it’s kind of a long story.”

Obi-Wan balanced his empty teacup on his knee and tried to hide his grin. “Is it? Well now. How intriguing.”

“And I’m...it’s been a long day, and maybe”--here Anakin faked a yawn, a wide stretch that send Tría frantically scrambling--“we could talk about it tomorrow? I’ve been sitting up on a bus for three days and I could really use a decent night’s sleep.”

For a moment, Obi-Wan considered pushing the matter because now he was terribly curious--but then he looked at the gangly, beautiful creature in front of him and took pity; or listened to his better angels, that’s all.

He stood. “If you can dislodge Dýo without getting clawed to pieces, then come along. I’ll show you where you’ll be staying. No, leave the plate there, it’s all right. Come on.”

  
______________________________  
  


  
Upstairs, he showed Anakin to the red room, a warm, curved space at the top of the house. 

“There’s a washroom round the corner,” he said, pointing back into the hall. “Second door on your left as you walk towards the stairs. And there should be fresh towels and things in the linen closet in there, along with plenty of soap.”

Anakin grinned and set his rucksack down by the bed. “Is that a hint?”

“Three days on a bus?” Obi-Wan’s lips twitched. “Yes, I’d say that’s a hint. Oh, which reminds me: there’s a basket there, see it? Anything you need have washed, just put there. We have a housekeeper who sweeps through twice a week; she’ll see to them.”

“A housekeeper?” Anakin waggled his eyebrows. “Fancy.”

Obi-Wan snorted. “Hardly. She’s here nearly every day when Qui-Gon’s here; he’s absolutely fastidious about something and utterly unaware of others. It takes both of us to keep him from burying every room under mountains of paper and ink. He lives in his own world, most days.”

He realized with a start that it was the first time he’d said Qui-Gon’s name out loud in nearly a month. _Professor Jinn isn’t in_ and _Shall I take a message for Professor Jinn_?, sure, but he’d not given himself a reason--or permission--to speak his Christian name, and what a strange silence that had been. Broken now. Oh, how it was.

“I love the way I sound coming from your mouth.” 

“Hmmm?” They’d been kissing and now they weren’t; Obi-Wan had wanted to get back to it, very much.

He remembered the slide of Qui-Gon’s fingers over his lips; a lazy touch, that had been counterpoint to the arrow that was Qui-Gon’s voice in the sanctuary of their bed. “When you say my name,” Qui-Gon murmured, “it sounds like a whole other language, one that you’ve created just for me. Will you say it for me again?”

Obi-Wan had twisted, breathless, the soft, slick place between his legs throbbing. “Qui-Gon.”

A soft hum against his throat, a nip. “Yes, my dear. Say it again.”

He’d strung his fingers through the rivers of chestnut and gray and pulled, none too gently, rocked himself against Qui-Gon’s thigh. “Qui-Gon?”

A big hand had plunged through the sheets and found the curve of his ass, squeezed it. “Again.”

The air around him had rippled, the night cut through with need and the brightness that only Qui-Gon could put there, stardust. “Qui-Gon!”

A chuckle, a long, greedy suck on his shoulder. “Yes, Obi-Wan?”

“Please fuck me,” he’d said, reedy, lost to everything except this, this man, this feeling, this willing surrender to that which it had terrified him to find because of the ever-present horror of its loss. He’d wound his arms around Qui-Gon’s neck and hidden his fears there, the thing in his eyes which he’d known then was love. 

“Is that what you want, dear one?”

He’d nodded his head, fiercely, and opened his legs. It’d been easier than speaking, easier than saying that which he could not, would not, let himself say.

“Oh, my sweet.” Qui-Gon’s mouth had gone butterfly even as he’d shifted and caged Obi-Wan with living steel, pressed inside him in one beautiful arch. “What I am is yours, always. All you ever need do is ask.”

“Is that what you call him?” Anakin said. “Oh, god, of course it is.”

“Is that what I--? What?”

Anakin was sitting on the edge of the bed, battling with untying his boots. “Professor Jinn. You call him Qui-Gon, huh?”

Obi-Wan crossed his arms over his chest. “That is his name, the last I checked.”

“No, yeah, I meant”--Anakin looked up, his expression sheepish--“I meant, sure you do. The way he talked about you, it was pretty clear that you guys are, ah. That you’re close.”

“I’m not sure what business that is of yours.” Oh Gods, Obi-Wan thought; he sounded terribly defensive, which was no defense at all. Whatever conclusions Anakin had drawn about he and Qui-Gon were most likely not at all false, and he didn’t seem troubled by them in the least. If he had been, why on earth would he have made this great trek out east?

No, what unsettled Obi-Wan, truly, was how untroubled by the whole matter Anakin seemed. Indeed, it felt as if this stranger knew more about their story--more about Qui-Gon?--than even Obi-Wan did. It was damned peculiar.

“None,” Anakin said quickly. “It’s none of my goddamn business. I’m sorry. I like hearing you talk about him, is all. I shouldn’t have--”

“Never mind,” Obi-Wan said, because he very much did, and backed toward the door. “See you in the morning, shall I?”

“Yeah, sure,” he heard Anakin say as he hurried down the hallway into the darkness and away from those inquisitive eyes. “Night.”


	4. Chapter 4

_Dear Qui-Gon_ , Obi-Wan wrote a few days later in the middle of the night, curled over a corner of his desk, _I understand that you’ve extended your notion of sanctuary to include would-be undergraduates from Kansas whose ability to pay the bursar is precisely--how shall I say it? None._

_While I should hope there is no more than one person in your recent past who fits this description, I know you too well to make such an assumption--the person I’m speaking of is a young man named Anakin. He says he was a stowaway in your course last summer at the University of Chicago; you found him out straightaway, he said. He also says that not did you not eject him for his cheek--if not for his attempt at fraud--but you gave him a set of the course texts at no cost. And (so he claims) proceeded to mark his papers just as harshly as those of the students who were paying for the privilege._

_Oh, Qui. What am I to do with you? For now the boy has shown up at your house, unannounced._

_Now, now, don’t fret--I’ve put him up in the red room and so far, things are going along fairly well. He doesn’t require a great deal of babysitting (unlike most of his age); during the day, while I’m working, he’s happy enough to keep to himself. He’s walked around every square inch of campus already and he’s turning his attention to greater Cambridge and at this rate, by the time you return, he’ll know our fair city by heart._

_I am a poor substitute for you, though. He’s doing his best to divine you through me; I swear he asks me a hundred questions about you a day. There is without question that particular undergraduate shine in his eyes when we talk about you--you know the one that I mean. I have no doubt that most nights, you star in his dreams._

_(In all fairness: you have a stubborn tendency to show up in mine, and my dreams have the distinct advantage, I think, of being based in real life.)_

_(Except for the one wherein you’re a king with a great golden crown and eyes born of fire and I’m your...well. Never mind.)_

_In case it isn’t clear from what’s above, I am growing fond of him, your Anakin. I can see why you liked him. He’s quite intelligent and unafraid of anything and he swears more than anyone I’ve ever met outside of His Majesty’s army. He’s eager to talk about everything from baseball (horrifying) to what he sees as the inherent contradictions in the writings of Isocrates (intriguing) to the goings-on in the ladies’ boardinghouse round the corner (at the very least, amusing). Most of the cats don’t mind him, though Skip, that old beast, isn’t keen--but then, who will that cat deign to put up with? Besides you, of course._

_And it doesn’t hurt that Anakin’s beautiful, does it? It isn’t difficult to while away the hours of your absence in the presence of such a creature, one who in another time people would have said was crafted by the gods. Even the dreadful state of his right arm can’t diminish his loveliness; if anything, the scars it bears underscore the lengths to which the world has demanded that his beautiful body bear pain. From the way he speaks about his upbringing--reluctantly, sparingly, since his first night here--I suspect there is more such sorrow inside of his soul._

_But I am an Englishman, as you are so fond of reminding me, and Englishmen--even happily Americanized ones--do not ask about such things. So I am left to ponder him at the supper table or at my side as he takes me on a gabborous tour of my own neighborhood: who is this boy whom the Fates have sent to me in lieu of you, hmm? And what is it that he’ll take from me?_

_(My first thought when I saw him on your doorstep was that he was a thief bold enough to ring the bell. I suppose, as that last question suggests, that sense hasn’t quite left me yet. Oh, I don’t think he’ll rob us blind--after all, what is there to steal? But when I see him here, seated at your table or laughing behind a glass of your wine, some part of me feels the word_ take _. I don’t know why. Perhaps I have a suspicious mind. Or perhaps--)_

_Never mind. Can you tell that I too have been enjoying your wine? Maybe the stains on this page have already given it away. We were drinking some of the ‘39, to be exact, the last shipment you had from France before Vichy. It was, as always, excellent, though it’s made me miss you terribly, acutely, as thought with ever sip like something sweet and good has been ripped from my chest._

_Oh, my darling. If I keep this pen to paper, who knows what will come out next? Something undoubtedly embarrassing or perhaps even pornographic and that will not do, will it? no matter how hard I am for you._

_If I stroke myself with my free hand as I write, would you know it? Can you tell from the tremor in this lines? If my body grows hot at the thought of your mouth where my fingers are and deeper, where they long to stray, would you know it if I were not bold enough to say?_

_There is so much I have not been bold enough to tell you, Qui, and for reasons I cannot fathom, Anakin reminds me of that every day._

_Yours,  
_ _OBK_

_Postscript. Anakin tells me that you showed him a photograph of me during your acquaintance in Chicago. Did you? Why?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is not what I sat down to write, yet again--at this point, the driver's seat belongs to Obi-Wan and I'm just along for the ride.


	5. Chapter 5

It was not Obi-Wan’s habit to write such letters to Qui-Gon during his sojourns, but then, in the years since they’d become more than teacher and student, Qui-Gon had never been gone for so long before. Six months now with nearly three more stretching ahead and truth be told, even before Anakin had parachuted into his life, Obi-Wan had becoming increasingly aware of how lonely he was.

Lonely and hurt.

He hadn’t been able to admit it to himself when Qui-Gon was packing up his trunk, or when they were on the train to New York, or even that last night they’d spent together in a dockside hotel--fundamentally, Qui-Gon’s decision to flit off to Greece for a better part of a year and not invite Obi-Wan to come with him, well, damn it all, it _stung_.

“You should be writing,” Qui-Gon had said when their bodies had quieted, when he held Obi-Wan in the warm cage of his arms. “All this year and the next. Every day, at least a page, with the words freely given--none of this trying to be precise nonsense, all right? Simply get your ideas down on paper; the color and the shape of them can come later.”

“We can’t all treat writing like an exorcism. Some of us are uneasy when what we write doesn’t match what’s in our mind.”

“Tsk.” Qui-Gon kissed his mouth, the taste of a smile, an old argument between them. “And how can you know what’s in your mind until you see it on the page, hmm?”

“What’s on the page,” Obi-Wan had said stubbornly, even as his hands found the curves of Qui-Gon’s chest, “should match what’s in your mind.”

Qui-Gon preened a little and leaned his head back, a summer rumble in throat. “You’ll do it your way,” he said, “of that I have no doubt, and I’ll set aside my peccadillos about process so long as you have something of substance for me to read waiting for me when I return.”

“You’ve never argued with my results before, δάσκαλος.” He pinched one brown nipple and then the next, his breath hot now against Qui-Gon’s neck. “No matter how much it drives you mad, the way I choose to get there, hmm?”

“Tease,” Qui-Gon said in English, and then louder, in Greek as Obi-Wan’s tongue followed the path his fingers had made. “Insufferable tease, oh god, dear one, please.”

There had been a brightness in Obi-Wan’s head then, the last fierceness of a sun before a storm. He’d wanted. Oh, how’d wanted. But he’d wanted to hear Qui-Gon desperate more. “Please what, hmm? I’m not a mind reader, darling.”

A grunt and the professor had shifted, rubbing his heat against Obi-Wan’s hip as his big body started to tremble. “Let me have you again.”

“Already?” Obi-Wan had licked at Qui-Gon’s nipples again, drawn one into his mouth, and tasted some of himself there, the bitter sweet of his earlier release. “Why, old man, you just did. Or have you already forgotten?”

And then he was on his back, flattened, Qui-Gon crouched over him, smiling and not, snarling and not, one great hand pushing Obi-Wan’s knees. “And I won’t get to bury myself inside you and feel you bloom around me and smell your spunk and fill you with my own until I can’t breathe for almost an entire fucking year, my dear, my Obi-Wan, and I’ll be damned if I don’t love you like this while I can.”

Then Qui-Gon had found his mark, the core of Obi-Wan's body, slick and dark, his desire a living force that swallowed Obi-Wan with a ferocity that had felt fragile, hadn't it, even as Qui-Gon drove into his body like a beast, and when the morning came, early and clear and cold, he’d stood at the dock until Qui-Gon’s ship was a glint on the horizon, holding in his mind as best he could the shape of Qui-Gon’s hands.

Obi-Wan had been left behind with a purpose, then, with a job, and he’d be damned if he’d done a lick of it.

Oh, he’d written every day without fail, but by the first week of June, the second week of Anakin’s stay, not a damn thing good had come of it.

He was lonely. He was hurt, he could see that now; hurt now coupled with embarrassed--why the hell had he sent Qui-Gon that letter? To write it in a fit of self-pitying Dionysian frenzy was one thing, but to seal it in an envelope and find the air mail stamps and consciously stick in the letterbox was a higher form of sort of madness, surely. He could only imagine--though how he tried desperately not to--what Qui-Gon would make of the thing.

_There is so much I have not been bold enough to tell you--_

Yes, and with damned good reason. Because there were some things, the war had taught him, very clearly, that should not be said, things for which it was best never to find the words.

_\--and for reasons I cannot fathom, Anakin reminds me of that silence every day._

Anakin. He’d said the boy was beautiful, hadn’t he? And so he seemed to Obi-Wan, more and more, as the strangeness of his presence had begun to sweetly, slowly melt into the everyday.

_____________

  
  
They had a routine now, established not through discussion but through repeated action:

In the morning, early, Obi-Wan would close himself in the study to write, and he would, however plodding and dull the task seemed, not emerging until, on the slowest days, he’d met the professor’s minimum of a single, typed-out page.

When he emerged, the smell of coffee would be drifting up from the kitchen along with the hum of the radio. Sometimes, he’d hear the scratch of Anakin’s voice as he sang along with something or spoke softly to the cats.

After breakfast, a shower and an companionable amble to campus, Anakin invariably racing ahead and then zipping back to ask a question or telling some awful joke or simply matching his pace to Obi-Wan’s more sedate one, a broad, happy smile never leaving his face. Most days, the kid would have his shirt sleeves turned back and no hat and he’d look for all the world like he belonged here. Like this was home.

On campus, they’d go their separate ways but invariably collide in the sluggish hours after noon somewhere in the library, Obi-Wan cross-eyed by ancient Greek and Anakin carrying a fresh half-dozen volumes on airplane mechanics and sophistic rhetoric and soap box derbys and the biology of junipers or some other damn things--Anakin’s mind was like a crow’s, Obi-Wan had quickly discovered, flitting merrily and without any damnable pattern to whatever subject he took a shine to each day. 

It didn’t matter what the kid wanted to read, really. Obi-Wan checked them all out.

On the walk home, Anakin would tuck everything beneath his good arm--even the ones that were Obi-Wan’s--and tip his face back to the sun, or the coming storm, nattering away while they walked: what he’d seen that day, what he was wondering, if Obi-Wan thought they had everything they needed to make Bolognese sauce.

A stop at the grocery, then, and soon it was evening, the last of the day simmering over the garden. If it was truly awful, they’d eat supper outdoors.

And then the radio again, and reading, and the comfort that came for Obi-Wan in having someone there at his side as slowly and smoothly came the night.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said that first week of June as they sat side-by-side on the sofa. “I don’t know if I’ve said that, have I? I’m sorry. I should have.”

Anakin looked up, startled, the book on inland fisheries he’d been reading nearly falling into his lap. “You’re, ah--you are?”

“Yes.” Obi-Wan felt his mouth turn down. “It is as much of a surprise as all that?”

“No! I mean, yeah, it kind of is.” Anakin shook his head, chuckling. “I sort of thought I was a pain in your ass.”

“Hardly.”

“It’s just--I don’t mean that you’ve been rude or anything. I don’t think it’s possible for you to do that. But I know that me being here has messed things up for you this summer. That’s obvious.”

Obi-Wan set down his book and fought the urge to cross his arms. “Is it? Pray tell.”

Anakin blinked. “Er, you’re--you’re working on your dissertation, right?”

“Correct.”

“And me being here is making it harder for you to do that.” The kid’s ears were pink. “Having a guest and all, you feeling like you have to entertain me, you know. That’s what I mean. You should be able to write, like, all the time, shouldn’t you, and with me here, you can’t.”

“First of all,” Obi-Wan said tightly, “I don’t feel as if I have to entertain you. You seem to do more than an adequate job handling that yourself. And second, I don’t fucking need you to tell me what I should or shouldn’t be doing with my time. It’s my work and my business and if anyone is babysitting anyone else in this scenario, as you’ve suggested, it’s me, not you!”

Anakin’s jaw was set. “I’m not telling you to do anything, Obi-Wan.”

“Yes, well you’d better bloody not. I’m more than capable of diagnosing my own inadequacies, thank you.”

“Inadequacies? What the fuck are you talking about?”

His face felt like a blaze. “You said I should be writing, Anakin. Believe me, I’m well and painfully aware of that.”

Anakin turned to him, furious, sending the fisheries book to the floor. “Don’t put words in my mouth. I said you _should_ be able to write all the time. And you’d be doing that if I wasn’t here!”

“No, I wouldn’t!”

“Yes, you _would_.”

There was a fist in Obi-Wan’s chest, an anchor; it felt like something was sinking inside him, deep and impossibly wide. “What the fuck do you think I was doing before you showed up, huh? Communing with the gods of _poesis_ every day? Spewing genius from my goddamn typewriter until the angels fucking sang?”

Anakin was in his face now, a finger poking sharp at his chest. “Yes! Qui-Gon said that you’re the best--”

He laughed, an octopus roil of old hurt and new; what was it about hearing the professor’s name coming from this infuriating boy’s mouth that stung so? “The best? The best what? The best worker bee? The best piece of ass? The best that he could find in my year? Oh, if only you’d been here then, Anakin, he’d never have to have settled for me.”

The kid stared at him, his mouth hung open in half-forgotten fury. “What is wrong with you? Fuck, Obi-Wan, Professor Jinn _loves_ you! Don’t you know that?”

“Does he now?" That laugh again, raking. "Really? And I suppose he told you that, did he?”

Anakin’s hands were on his face all once, a hot, slim-fingered frame--and what a stun it was, the unshaking faith in that his touch. “He didn’t have to say it; it was there in the way he talked about you.” He stroked his thumbs over Obi-Wan’s beard. “And then he showed me your picture one night, this little silver frame he kept next to his bed, and I knew.”

He was holding Anakin’s shoulders; when had that happened? Why was there salt in his eyes? “He’s never said.” The words were thick in his throat. “I didn’t know.”

A tip of that dark head and their mouths were brushing. The boy’s lips were impossibly soft. “Sure you did,” Anakin murmured as they leaned into each other slowly, two stars falling together towards the earth. “Oh, Obi-Wan, sweetheart. Yes, you did.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mind the tag updates, folks.

_Dearest Obi-Wan_ , read a letter which, at that very moment, lay between a haberdasher's bill and a grocery circular in the letterbox beside the front door. _To answer your question, first and foremost: did I show Anakin your picture last year? Yes._

_I hope you’ll forgive me for being a sentimental old fool, but the photograph of which you speak is one of my most treasured possessions--albeit one that you’ve never seen. It is here with me now, battered a bit by the Mediterranean wind as it--as you--stand watch over my desk._

_You’ll be reassured, perhaps, by the fact that my desk here is so small; no room for paper jungles to grow. But no matter; that’s what the floor is for._

_The picture of you, to return to the matter at hand, is one taken your first year here at some reception or other. You’re smiling in it, broadly, as if you’re about to laugh. You’re wearing white. You have a drink in your hand._

_It hurts me to look at it, at present, because I cannot go into the next room and find you and say something stupid so I can see that look bloom on your face in real life and watch you throw back your head and let loose your wonderful laugh._

_It hurts me, too, because in your letter, my dear one, I hear things that I have never before heard you say._

_My only consolation at present is the certainty, now, that I have done the right thing in sending Anakin to you._

_And yes, he is beautiful, isn’t he?_

_When I first saw him in Chicago, sitting halfway towards the back of the lecture hall, he shone. Which is how I knew he didn’t belong there, I suppose: he wanted to be there so badly. He was so desperate, it seemed to me, even that first day, to know and to understand and to learn._

_He’d never taken Greek before; has he told you that? Knew less about the language than your average Harvard freshman. But he took to it like a duck to the proverbial pond and by the third week, when most of his colleagues were beginning to resent me and my red pen, Anakin was thriving like an iris in a hothouse--and oh, Obi-Wan. The way the language sounded on his tongue; when he spoke up in class, even his classmates would turn and look at him and stare._

_I suppose he’d told you about his early life, the struggles and no small triumphs that landed him in proximity of my class. Has he told you why he chose it? He told me, with no small modesty, that my subject was the only one on the summer roster that he knew absolutely nothing about._

_He told me this over supper, some month or so into our acquaintance, sitting at my borrowed table, not drinking my wine. He ate everything I put in front of him and yet he barely stopped talking--not about himself, mind you, unless I asked, but about the thousands of questions that were roaming around in his head, the places where he might find answers. He is, as perhaps you’ve already learned, a person who is keenly aware of all that he doesn’t know and all the more eager to read and to learn and to find._

_He is a seeker, Anakin. Or so he was with me. With every fiber of his being, he sought._

_I would be lying if I said I hadn’t considered the possibilities that might come to light that night; if they hadn’t intrigued me, I would have suggested we meet elsewhere to take a meal, yes? In the kindest reading of the evening, I could say I thought there was no harm in entertaining them._

_But the truth is that I knew I was opening a door, and though I had no intention of walking through it, I was keenly aware that I did not know what Anakin would do if he noticed that it was ajar._

_What he did was this:_

_He stood at the door having said his goodbyes--I thought I was free and clear, you see--and then turned back with this extraordinary look in his eyes. He said:_

Can I kiss you, Professor?

_Just like that, just that simple. As my answer should have been._

_But I did not say no; I did not say anything. Instead, I stepped close and let him reach for me and he did not let go until he was spread out in my bed, his body flushed against the sheets as he watched me clumsily disrobe and then he was holding on to me again as I kissed him and let myself drown in his beauty and the stubborn silk of his skin._

_He came before I was inside of him, writhing beneath me and whining into my ears, and when I breached him, oil everywhere and him hard again, he looked at me with so much joy and arched his back and spunked himself again._

_Perhaps this pains you to read; I hope not. It feels like a bloodletting to write. I should not have kept this from you. It makes me ill, now, that I did._

_I kissed him, after. Laid my mouth over every part of his flesh. When I licked the scars of his damaged arm, there was a hitch in his breath._

Who is that? _he asked me._

_Who is who? I said._

_He then pointed at your picture on the nightstand._ Him.

_That’s Obi-Wan, I said, no small twinge._

Ok. And who is Obi-Wan?

_The love of my life, I said._

_I said this without thinking, without needing conscious thought: it simply was. But I had not known it until that moment. Not so starkly or so clearly. I knew that I adored you and that I craved you and that the color and turn of our days together were the brightest I had known in all of my years but I am ashamed to admit it now, how blind I was to what it was I really felt. More than affection. More than adoration. Love, Obi-Wan. Love._

_It stunned me._

Oh. _Anakin blinked and brushed my hair from eyes._ Why isn’t he here?

_He has work to do, I said, surprised by the taste of maudlin in my mouth, a little twist of something deep in my heart. Work that will long outlast me._

_And then I kissed Anakin again, because I did not want to think about how much I missed you, how easily I had allowed myself to betray you--how desperate I suddenly was to touch you and to see you again. I was angry with myself for not asking you to come with me--I know how much you’d wanted me to, but I’d told myself I was doing what was best for you, for your future, and even now I don’t know how much of that was what I really felt as opposed to what I thought I should do. Even now, my dearest, I have a hard time reconciling all that lies ahead for you as a scholar and a teacher and whatever sort of life I might give you. I am old and I am too set in my ways and though I love you more than I have ever loved anyone in my life, it feels selfish to me to saddle you with my affections. There is so much more in this world for you to see and to be and to do._

_Those last weeks in Chicago, Anakin did not stay with me every night, but when he did, after we satisfied ourselves with each other, he wanted to know about you. That insatiable curiosity again; you were an unknown subject suddenly revealed and in the happy shadow of our time together, what he craved was to hear me talk about you._

_When we parted, it was sweetly, and with no promises--other than a broadly-stated invitation that someday, if he wished it, he was welcome to visit me in Boston and to meet you._

_That I did not tell you about this before now was an act of cowardice on my part, one which, since we parted at the ship’s side, I have regretted with every waking breath. For I made the same mistake again, didn’t I? I left you there. I should have asked you to come with me; you could have as easily been banging away at your typewriter here as you could have at home, but I--_

_It’s that old twinge, Obi-Wan, a battle with what feels like selfishness. I want what is best for you. And I’m not sure that is me._

_So I sent a telegram to Anakin not long after I arrived here--a misadventure in and of itself, but a story for another day--and extended my invitation again. I did not tell him I would not be there to greet him. I did not tell him that what he would find there was you, only you._

_You are well-suited to each other in a thousand ways. I could feel that in Chicago; I feel it more acutely now. And even if what you find together is no more than a friendship, it brings me great comfort to know that you will have that._

_If what you find is something more than that, something more akin to love, then I will rejoice for you both and breathe more easily knowing that you will face the future together._

_Selfish, I know; I was ever thus, though you’ve always thought better of me._

_But then again, it’s clear from your letter that you do not understand how much I love you, and oh, my dear, how I’ve failed you. I have spent the past months trying to translate how I feel into speech--and if not speech, into action--and I have failed. You are the most precious thing that the fates have ever deigned to bring into my life and that you don’t know that tears at something inside me._

_Worse, worse: I knew that you loved me. I’ve known it since that night in the garden when you came up on your knees in the dirt and kissed me. I have known it all this time and yet I couldn’t let myself understand how much I loved you in return until I’d betrayed you and then, what a slippery slope it has been of failure on my part and now, the deepest regret compounded by my own hubris that I knew, for you, what was best._

_I have been a fool, Obi-Wan, and putting it all down like this on paper makes me feel all the more so, but you deserve the truth._

_\--Q_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, Qui...


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that the rating's gone up.

Upstairs, the house was warm, the walls clinging to the last of the day’s heat, the air in Obi-Wan’s bedroom--in Jinn’s--thick with the smells of summer, the approaching storm. 

Anakin’s shoulders were damp beneath his shirt, white cotton that clung to the lines of his undershirt, the hidden ridges of his chest, and he held Obi-Wan so tightly as they leaned against the doorframe, kissing, the slide of their mouths even fiercer and faster than it had been on that damn couch downstairs.

“Stop,” Obi-Wan had breathed there, Anakin half-folded into his lap. “This isn’t enough; I want to have all of you. Let’s go upstairs. We need a bed."

Anakin had groaned in his ear and clawed at his neck and it had taken them a while to find their feet and make their way down the long hall and up and up and now they were on the edge of something that to Obi-Wan felt big and beautiful and bright here in the shadows of the evening with the smell of ozone on the wind’s breath.

“Quit it,” Anakin said, nipping at Obi-Wan’s throat. 

“Quit what?”

“Thinking. I can hear your gears grinding.”

“Oh, can you now?”

“God, yes.” A rush of air as Anakin peeled open his shirt. “And I love your brain, I really do, but right now what I want is your dick.” 

Obi-Wan felt a vicious shove of desire. “Is that so?”

Anakin growled, his hips pinning Obi-Wan’s to the doorframe, his eyes twin, greedy flames. “ _Yes_. Can’t you tell? Can’t you feel how hard I am for you? Do you know how long I’ve wanted to touch you? Put my mouth on you? Fuck, Obi-Wan, you don’t--!”

And then they were kissing again, snarling, both of them, and staggering unevenly towards the bed.

“Take it off,” Anakin spat, his fingers caught in Obi-Wan’s belt. 

“What?”

A whimper as metal gave and a button popped and then Obi-Wan was falling, his back crashing into the coverlet as Anakin’s hand curled over his cock. A grin Obi-Wan could hear. “Jesus. Everything.”

In a moment, hours, clothes were gone and Anakin was stretched silk and stubborn steel settled atop Obi-Wan’s body and oh, gods, he was everywhere, writhing, smiling, grunting when their cocks brushed, when Obi-Wan’s hands wound tight in his hair.

“I’m gonna make you come,” Anakin said in the soft space between their mouths. “I’m gonna make you come and then I’m gonna get inside you and make you come again.”

“Big talk,” Obi-Wan said, thrust and parry.

“Oh, is it?”

“Yeah, it is. Seeing as you’re about to come all over yourself just from humping my thigh.”

Anakin made an outraged noise and raised his head, his hips stuttering to a halt. “No, I'm not.”

Obi-Wan grinned up into that beautiful, heated face. “Yes, you are.”

“I am _not_ ,” Anakin said stubbornly.

He reached between them and stroked the rose petal heat at the tip of Anakin’s dick. “You’re dripping, Anakin. You’re so close.”

Anakin bit his lip; his whole body rippled with barely contained pleasure. “No.”

“Maybe I want you to come. Maybe I want to watch you like this, watch you lose it. Did you ever think about that?”

Where were the words coming from, he wondered vaguely? This wasn’t him. He never ran off at the mouth like this in bed. But Anakin didn’t know that, and Anakin seemed to like it, shaking as he was in Obi-Wan’s hand.

“No.” Anakin’s eyes were half-closed and he was rocking now, feeding himself into Obi-Wan’s fist, his own balled in the pillow, caging Obi-Wan’s head. “D’you want that? Want me to make a mess on you?”

“Yes,” Obi-Wan whispered, because he did now, now that Anakin had put the image in his head.

“Oh, god.” Loud, as if he couldn’t contain himself. “Oh, god.”

He squeezed Anakin’s thigh and cupped the warm curve of his ass, all the time his fist moving, all the time his breath speeding up again, trying to match the wind’s gusts. “That’s it. Come on. Come on me, Anakin, and then you can open me up--”

“Yes.”

“And push your pretty cock inside me--”

“ _Fuck_.”

“And when you do that, my darling, when you fuck me hard, like I want you to, you know what you’ll do?”

A whine. “What?”

He raised his head and rubbed their mouths together. “You’ll make a mess of me all over again, won’t you?”

Then the air stank of sex and Anakin was shouting and singeing Obi-Wan’s skin and kissing him sloppily, spurting again over Obi-Wan’s fist.

“Jesus god,” Anakin murmured. “I knew you were a good talker, sweetheart, but fuck.”

He blinked. “You liked that?”

Anakin kissed the hot skin beneath Obi-Wan’s jaw and hummed, his back shivering, one last tremor. “Uh, no kidding. Did you miss the part where I shot all over you? Hearing you say those things, what you wanted me to do to you, that was--fuck me, that was hot.”

“Really?”

“God yes. But hell, you could read the phone book and I’d get hot.”

“I very much doubt that.” He nuzzled the sweat on Anakin’s forehead, chuckling. “The Cambridge phone directory is especially dull. If I had the New York white pages, maybe, but--”

Anakin snorted. “Mmmhmm. Did you mean it, though?”

“Mean what?”

Anakin sat up a little, smirking, the cat eyeing the cream. “Do you want me to fuck you?”

Suddenly, he was aware of his body, his glorious, painful arousal; the emptiness at the center of him, the _need_ \--for this stranger who’d somehow become a friend, and now, impossibly, had become more than that.

He threw his arms around Anakin’s neck and grinned wanton into that lovely, flushed face. “Yes,” Obi-Wan said. “Yes. Oh, yes.”

And as the storm broke at last over Cambridge, water and electricity pouring from the sky, Anakin turned him over and Anakin worked him open and Anakin fucked him before he was ready and it felt so good, having Anakin give him everything that he’d asked for that it felt like he was crumbling, like something inside of him, old and solid, was giving way to the maelstrom at last.

“That’s it,” Anakin hissed in his ear. “Oh god, that’s it, touch yourself. Stroke it. Fuck, you feel so good. So hot, jesus fuck, so goddamn tight, you’re so tight, Obi-Wan, you’re so--!”

When Obi-Wan came, there were no words, there was no thought--of Qui-Jonn, of heartache, of anything that might have come before. There was only Anakin everywhere, Anakin filling him, Anakin chanting his name again and again, a sweet, needy litany that made his heart thunder as the world and everything in it went white.


	8. Chapter 8

“You all right?”

“Hmm?”

Anakin lifted his head shaggily from Obi-Wan’s chest. “I said, are you all right?”

“Of course.” He touched Anakin’s lips, traced them into a smile. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I’m just checking. You’re awful quiet.”

Obi-Wan chuckled. “Are you afraid you fucked the sense out of me?”

“No.” Anakin waggled his eyebrows. “Should I be?”

“Very funny.”

Anakin turned his face and kissed the inside of Obi-Wan’s wrist. “I thought so.”

“Is that your ultimate goal, then? To divest me of all my good sense?”

He’d meant it lightly, another feint in their ongoing banter, but something in Anakin’s expression--serious, suddenly, and frighteningly soft--told him it had not landed that way.

“No,” Anakin said. “I want you to be happy, Obi-Wan. I want to make you happy every day that I know you, whatever that might look like.” He bowed his head and their mouths met; Obi-Wan felt the gentle slash of his tongue. “But I’m a selfish bastard.”

He slid his fingers into those lovely dark curls, shivered when Anakin leaned back into his hold. “Oh really?”

“Mmmm.”

Blood curled back towards his cock at the sound, at the feel of Anakin stirring again at his hip. “And how do you figure that?”

“Because I’m so glad that what made you happy tonight was this.” He kissed Obi-Wan again, harder now, slow and gloriously urgent. “Not that I don’t like sitting with you and reading or listening to the radio or watching fireflies or whatever but oh my God, I fucking love this.”

“Yes?”

A punched-out gust of laughter. “Yes! Like you couldn’t tell.”

“Good,” Obi-Wan said against Anakin’s hot, perfect mouth. “Get on your back.” 

There were some moments in life, Obi-Wan had long ago learned, that imprinted themselves like permanent photographs in the brain, tattoed images of horror and beauty, of pleasure and sorrow, that the merest hint of remembrance could conjure back to full color before one’s unthinking eyes. For him, there was far more sorrow for him in such moments that there had been joy: his grandfather’s funeral, his mother’s face the night his father left, broken bodies in small towns plowed over by Nazi tanks in the French countryside, the shock of what had come still plain on their faces even in the absence of life.

But on that night, as he pushed Anakin deep into ruffled sheets and straddled his hips, reached beneath to press the rose of Anakin’s cock against the part of him that was still open and wet, he knew he was in the midst of such a moment, one that would be burned forever into his memory, for how could he ever forget the look on Anakin’s face as Obi-Wan slowly sank down and welcomed him back inside? It was one of awe, yes, one of barely contained greed, but there was something dearly soft about it, too, something soft mirrored in the gentle clench of Anakin’s hands on his thighs.

“That’s it,” Obi-Wan said, his voice stretched deliciously thin. “That’s it, Anakin. Let me have all of you.”

He rode Anakin slowly, slower than he wanted to, but oh, it was worth it to feel Anakin tremble, to hear his voice stutter and whine, to slap Anakin’s hands away when he reached for Obi-Wan’s cock and pin them back to his thighs.

“Not yet,” he said, squeezing Anakin’s wrists. “In a minute, love. This is for you.”

The fierce curve of Anakin’s chin trembled; his voice did, too. “Fuck.”

The moon had fought its way through the clouds and the air was clearer now, leached of the heaviness that it had held on to all day. Now, as midnight approached, the sullen light of the orb slipped through the windows and fell in long shards over the bed and oh, how it made Anakin’s beauty, the intensity of his desire, his pleasure stand out to Obi-Wan in stark relief. Gods, he thought, watching Anakin’s lips part as he himself cried out, what joy there was in giving himself to someone like this.

“I want to touch you,” Anakin panted. “Obi-Wan, please, I need to.”

Oh, hell. Obi-Wan felt his cock jerk, the tell-tale slick at its tip. “No. Not yet.”

Anakin arched off the bed, his dick driving deeper inside; Obi-Wan had to pitch back to take it. “ _Please_. Oh, god.”

“I think,” Obi-Wan managed, “I think you can come just fine like this.”

“Don’t want to. Don’t make me. It isn’t fair, don’t--” Anakin writhed, his nails digging into Obi-Wan’s flesh, his breath coming in ardent, angry gasps that Obi-Wan found incredibly endearing. “Obi-Wan, goddamn it. You want me to touch you. I know you do. You’ve wanted it ever since that first day.”

“Have I?” He pushed Anakin’s hair from his eyes, scraped a hand down the wet plains of his chest. “How can you be so sure of that?”

“The way you looked at me,” Anakin breathed. His heart was pounding, its rhythm frantic under Obi-Wan’s palm. “It was in your eyes the second you opened the front door, I knew--I was so glad it was you.”

“Why? You didn’t know me then.”

Anakin moaned; inside, he swelled. “Knew enough. Knew you were beautiful. Knew that the professor loved you."

There was a score of heat down Obi-Wan’s back, a whisper, and for a moment, he could feel Qui-Gon in the room with them, imagine him here: in the window seat, perhaps, his arms crossed, his sharp gaze locked on the bed; or sitting beside them, perhaps, here, on this bed, his lips on the curve of Obi-Wan’s neck, his hands ensuring Anakin’s stayed in their place.

_Beautiful_. The sigh of wonder in the professor’s voice, that old familiar curve of heat. _Alone, you’re exquisite, but finding pleasure together, my dear ones, you are the epitome of ομορφιά. All the gods could have wished for, and more._

All at once, Obi-Wan found himself falling, found his hands buried beneath the pillow that crowned Anakin’s head, found himself breathing into Anakin’s mouth. “Touch me,” he whispered in a voice that felt infinite. “Darling, it’s all right. Let me feel your hands on me.”

This time, when Anakin came, every part of him shook, and he made a sound that felt like shattered glass; when Obi-Wan came, he made the same sound, but softer, as Obi-Wan’s seed slid over his fist.

“We should clean up,” Obi-Wan said vaguely when they’d parted and he’d curled himself around Anakin’s back. 

Anakin found Obi-Wan’s hand where it lay against his stomach and wound their fingers together. “Don’t go,” he said, stubborn, sleep plain in his voice. “It’ll keep. It’s fine.” 

“It is not. There’ll be hell to pay in the morning if we don’t.”

“Shhhh,” Anakin muttered. He laid his head back, his hair soft and damp on Obi-Wan’s shoulder. “‘S ok. It’ll keep.”

Obi-Wan kissed Anakin’s temple and breathed in the smell of him, of sex and sweat, of the steam left by the rain. “Maybe you’re right.”

“‘Course I am, baby.” A tired nuzzle at his beard, the trace of a smile. “Listen to me for once, huh? Do what I tell you. Go to sleep.”


	9. Chapter 9

The next morning, much to Obi-Wan's surprise, felt as familiar as any other had that summer, even as it beautifully broke their routine.

He woke early, as always, but instead of plodding to his study and chaining himself to the written world, he lay quietly, listening to the world beyond the window waking up and to Anakin’s deep, easy breaths. Sometime in the night, their positions had shifted; now, they lay on their sides, Anakin’s dark head tucked in the curve of Obi-Wan’s shoulder and his arms wound tight around Obi-Wan.

Their hips were nearly flush, their legs tangled, and dear gods, were they sticky. It was just as he'd feared.

But Anakin was warm and soft beside him except for that part of him that was very much not and surely, Obi-Wan thought as his hand slipped from Anakin’s hip, whatever insights he might have found at the typewriter could wait a bit longer, couldn’t they?

A few minutes later, Anakin awoke with a sweet, startled gasp and clutched at Obi-Wan’s hair and lost himself to Obi-Wan’s grip as if the pleasure had been torn out of him, the bedroom vibrating with his hoarse shout, one he made Obi-Wan taste, and then it was impossible for Obi-Wan to climb out of bed for another half hour, at least.

“Good morning,” Anakin hummed, smirking against Obi-Wan’s cheek, rubbing his fingers through the fresh spend on Obi-Wan’s chest. 

“Yes,” Obi-Wan said when speech was possible again. “It is rather, isn’t it?”

A shower then, at last, and then coffee and the last of the bacon and burned toast. Burned because Anakin had come down wearing only trousers and suspenders and Obi-Wan found the bare turn of his shoulders impossible not to touch. As were the score marks on his back.

He brushed his fingertips over three of the angry red rivers. “Oh dear. Did I hurt you?”

Anakin laughed. “Not hardly. Kind of the opposite, really.” Here he turned away from the stove, his eyes pretty and running towards dark. “I liked that you wanted me so bad.” 

Inexplicably, Obi-Wan found himself blushing. The night’s ardors were one thing, but this, here, to be tugging Anakin away from the burners and pushing him against the low counter and taking that greedy, red mouth in the sunlight felt like something else entirely, a new sort of intimacy, the kind born of years in each other’s company, years living in the same space; years, not days. It felt electric, kissing Anakin like that, in the middle of everything, with the cats at their ankles and the smell of the garden drifting in through the open door and the sounds of other people’s lives moving around them outside. It felt terribly, terrible good, having Anakin arch against him, his bare arms hot around Obi-Wan’s neck as in each other both of them lost their breath. Not just good. It felt right.

“That’s all she wrote for the toast,” Anakin said when they parted. He rubbed his mouth against Obi-Wan’s beard. “You want I should make some eggs?”

“An interesting idea,” Obi-Wan said. “One worth considering. Or I could suck you off.”

“Oh, fuck.” Anakin jerked in his arms, his back bowing off the counter. “Fuck breakfast. That.”

He was smooth and hot when Obi-Wan drew him out; he twitched when Obi-Wan sank to his knees. He tasted, for a moment, too much like Ivory soap, but then there was bitterness and the sweet musk of his body as it rose from between his thighs and Obi-Wan was drunk on the taste of him, the desperate note that shaded the rise and fall of his hips, the look in those pale, perfect eyes.

“I can’t,” Anakin panted as he arched into Obi-Wan’s mouth and pulled wonderfully and far too hard at Obi-Wan’s hair. “I’m gonna come, Obi-Wan, shit, I can’t wait, I…” His thumb found the stretched corner of Obi-Wan’s lips and slipped inside, pressing against his shaft, and Obi-Wan could feel what it did to Anakin, being able to feel every slide. “Oh, god, oh fuck. Oh god, oh _fuck_ , it’s--”

He came so loudly he startled Tría and Vasílissa the couch, and never mind the neighbors.

“That door is open, you know.” Obi-Wan slid to his feet and pointed. “You just woke up the whole neighborhood.”

Anakin caught his hands in Obi-Wan’s previously unwrinkled shirt and pulled him close. “You should’ve thought of that before you let me come in your mouth. God, Obi-Wan.”

Obi-Wan licked his lips, hummed at the sweet bitterness. “May I kiss you?”

“Believe me,” Anakin said, tipping his face down to meet Obi-Wan’s, “that’s a question you never have to ask, because the answer’s always going to be the same.”

“And what’s that?”

He could feel Anakin smile. “I think you know, huh? _Yes_.”

After breakfast, they walked to the library, as always. This time, though, Obi-Wan had a very difficult time reminding himself not to take Anakin’s hand in the street, a task made more difficult by Anakin’s decision not to race ahead but to walk the whole blasted way at Obi-Wan’s side. When they stopped at the corners, their shoulders would brush and he’d feel the tease of Anakin’s fingers sitting so near his own and his stomach would turn in a heady mix of exhilaration and frustration and a blossoming want that grew so strong he nearly caught Anakin by the arm and swung him back towards home, towards a door they could close again between themselves and the world so that all that remained was what lay between them: everything.

“You’re gonna have to stop looking at me like that,” Anakin said at they passed through the campus gates.

“Like what?”

Anakin leaned over and pitched his lips to Obi-Wan’s ear. “Like you want to devour me.”

Obi-Wan sighed rather theatrically. “That’ll be difficult.”

There was a twinkle in Anakin’s eye, a sometime supernova. “And why’s that?”

“Because,” Obi-Wan said, people walking past them be damned, “that’s exactly what I want to do.”

Later, it wasn’t clear to him whether Anakin was truly interested in the aerodynamic properties of water fowl or if it was merely the first book he could grab. Regardless, he was careless about finding the book that just last night had seemed vital to his own work and their visit was, by any measure, the shortest they’d ever had.

They raced home in the June heat and Obi-Wan fumbled at the door with the key and in their eagerness, their books were abandoned on the porch beneath the letterbox as they crashed inside and raced up the stairs, stupid with need.

“You’re impossible,” Obi-Wan breathed as they fell onto the bed. “Not all of us are 19, you know. I can’t do this all day.”

Anakin straddled his hips and beamed down at him, scrabbled for the buttons on Obi-Wan’s shirt. “Pffft. It’s not my fault you’re gorgeous.”

“True.”

“And,” Anakin said, purring as his palms found the heat of Obi-Wan’s undershirt, the skin he’d set alight beneath it, “it’s not my fault that you’re so much fun to fuck.”

“It’s not, eh?" Obi-Wan arched his back, desire fluttering in his belly. "Well, I have a decent partner at present. You might give him some of the credit.”

Anakin pinched at his nipples. “Maybe,” he murmured. He lowered his mouth to meet his fingers and groaned when Obi-Wan grunted and caught the back of Anakin’s neck, held him there. “Just a little bit, huh?"


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Those reading along from day to day will note that I have moved the last bit from yesterday's chapter to the top of this one, for reasons that I hope are apparent.

There was supper in time, and a little wine, and then Anakin remembered the books on the porch. He brought them in and settled next to Obi-Wan on the couch.

“Mail,” he said, waggling a stack in Obi-Wan’s direction. “Did you forget to get it yesterday?”

Obi-Wan kissed Anakin’s hair absently, his eyes lost in the evening paper. “Did I? I don’t know. Just set it on the table, hmm? It’ll keep.”

They sat like that for a long while as evening slowly descended. Obi-Wan traded the paper for his book and Anakin lost himself in his, long legs stretched over the coffee table, his bare feet bait for a few meandering cats. The door to the garden was open again and there a steady shuffle in and out, some supplementing their supper and some chasing shadows and a few stretching out to have a sleep in the warm grass. There were fireflies outside, and wind in the trees. After the heat of the day, of their urgent lovemaking, now there was comfort and peace.

“I love this,” Anakin said, his voice barely audible over the tick of the clock. “Being here with you like this--sometimes, I think it’s a dream. Even before we...even before last night. I never thought there was anything like this in life.”

Obi-Wan chuckled. “A long way from Kansas, eh Dorothy?”

“A long way from a lot of things.” Anakin ducked under Obi-Wan’s arm and leaned into him. “It’s so peaceful here, honestly. You have no idea.”

“Oh, I have some. I haven’t always lived in a place like this, you know.”

“You mean England?”

“Well, yes, but I thinking of the war.” He let out a breath and set down his book, tugged Anakin closer. “Nearly five years of it and by the end, I’d forgotten what life was supposed to look like; I’d spent too long amongst its destruction. My head was a miasma that first year, after. All I could see when I looked about or when I closed my eyes was death.”

Anakin had gone very still, as if Obi-Wan were a deer he might startle. He said: “I didn’t know you were a soldier.”

“Oh, yes. And a good one, so they said. I was promoted in the field several times until I was in actuality a leader of men.” He closed his eyes and set his head against Anakin’s. “Which sounds all well and good until one realizes that it means one has more than one life in his hands. I didn’t care for that very much. For the last year, I hardly slept. They were my charges, you see, and my responsibility, and when I dared lay my head down I could picture all their mothers and fathers and lovers staring pointedly at me, saying _you’d best bring him home in one piece_. Hard to rest when you feel the eyes of so many on you like that.”

Anakin’s hand spread over his chest; an anchor, it felt like, a living counterweight to what he didn’t care to think about, what he never spoke of. It had been at least a couple of years before he’d spoken of any of this to Qui-Gon, and even then, those conversations had been stilted; the professor, he knew, had always been careful not to ask too many questions, or to push, and maybe, he thought now, being treated as something so fragile had made the words even more difficult to come by. That, and he idolized Qui-Gon, once a soldier himself, and some part of him feared judgement from the man about his own inability to come to terms with all that he had seen and done.

It was easier to say these things to Anakin, regardless. He found it difficult to stop now that he’d begun.

He filled his lungs for a moment, let it out. “And I couldn’t do that, of course, keep all of them safe. War doesn’t work that.”

“I’m sure you did everything you could.”

“Did I? I don’t know. I’m not sure it would have made a great deal of difference if I had. Bullets and bombs don’t particular give a shit about the effort you’ve spent dodging them; when they come, they come, no matter how well-prepared you tell yourself that you are. Cold comfort, that is, when your boy doesn’t come home.”

Anakin’s arm tightened stubbornly about his waist, as if he could keep Obi-Wan from sinking too far into the depths of the past. “But you did. You survived.”

“In body, anyway.” He laughed, a soft, bitter sound. “The most I ever needed was a plaster, believe it or not. Five years out there and I never even got shot. My thoughts, though, oh, how they were torn and bruised. So much death, Anakin; but not just that. So much destruction. Entire towns razed, and not always by the Nazis. Sometimes the locals were simply caught in the crossfire and it was too inconvenient for other side to slide a mile north or south before trying to pulverize each other, so these people, their whole lives were just...in the way. And when I went home, all I could see was my parents’ house in ashes around them; the sky burning, the village falling to rubble, and the people I’d known all my life crushed beneath it, invisible, silent, the only sound the fall of the dust.”

His mother’s form, torn in half; his brother’s body in pieces on the grass. His father’s hand reaching for him from a hill of stones in the garden, a hand with no body attached. These were the things Obi-Wan had seen in his mind over and over; these were the images that had haunted him. He saw them now, as Anakin pressed closer and murmured against his neck.

“It’s all right,” Anakin said. His knees were drawn up from the table; he was half-folded into Obi-Wan’s lap, the weight of him a fundamental sort of comfort. “You’re here with me, baby. None of that happened. It’s ok. You’re ok, huh?”

Obi-Wan shuddered. He wanted to say, _No, it isn’t_. He wanted to say, _No, I’m not_. But he didn’t believe that. There, with Anakin a warm force against him and the sounds of the nightbirds outside, he felt a distance from the man he’d been in those first months home, the one who had been reluctant to leave his childhood bedroom, the one who’d refused to eat and didn’t sleep. The one who couldn’t bear to think about going back to school, about wandering the same happy paths he had before, when war was something Homer and Sophocles and Euripides wrote about, an abstract if not poetic concept he never dreamed he’d see himself. To go back would be to understand what a child he’d been--how lucky, eh? How protected--and some fierce part of him beneath his terror and grief wanted to imagine that boy at Oxford, untouched, reading and learning and knowing nothing more than what the poets said about the tragedies of war. He’d wanted--no, he’d needed with every knot in his soul--to believe that a boy like that who wore his face still wandered happily there.

“I wasn’t all right for a long time,” he said to Anakin, half a year flattened into a phrase. “And I don’t think I would’ve been if I hadn’t come here.”

“If the professor hadn’t sent for you. He told me he had to get very pushy.”

“Did he now?” He felt a flicker of unease, just a ripple. It was odd to hear that he’d been a topic of conversation and not known it; to share another person’s secrets so freely was unlike Qui-Gon. But then, here he was emptying his heart to Anakin without really understanding why he’d been so moved. Perhaps the professor had been similarly affected. “Well,” he said, brushing his mouth over Anakin’s crown, “I suppose he would see it that way. He’s used to waving his hand and having graduate students leap to his side. That he had to send more than one letter of invitation shocked him, probably.”

“He’s that famous, huh?”

“Famous, no. But well-regarded, yes. Surely you know that. Didn’t he drop a hundred unsubtle hints in your course about his publications and his books and all that?”

Anakin grinned, a curve that Obi-Wan could feel against his throat. “He might have mentioned something about that. And his lecture tours. And how fortunate we were that his schedule had allowed him to spend so much time with us, and how we should make the most of the opportunity. But all in a very humble way.”

“Yes,” Obi-Wan said dryly, “he’s very good at that, reminding you of how wonderful he is without sounding like an ass. It’s a talent, truly, one few academicians in my experience possess.”

“You miss him,” Anakin said. 

He kissed Anakin’s hair again and remembered for a moment the bedroom, the phantom trace of Qui-Gon at his back. “Terribly.”

“You love him, don’t you?”

And God help him, it was easy to say aloud to Anakin, that thing which he’d so resisted acknowledging to himself, much less told Qui. “Yes,” Obi-Wan said, as simple as letting out breath. “I do.”

“He loves you.”

“You’ve made that assertion before. I don’t know that I can agree.”

“What?” Anakin raised his head, incredulous. “Come on. That’s bullshit.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Even,” Obi-Wan said, “if I were inclined to believe it--which I’m not--there’s something about Qui that you don’t understand.”

“And what’s that, exactly?”

Obi-Wan reached out and tucked a rogue curl behind Anakin’s ear. “Anakin,” he said, “I’m not the first of Qui-Gon’s students who’s ended up in his bed.”

“So?”

“So. He has a reputation. Not quite notorious, and nothing vile, but well known among a certain set.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There was someone before me,” Obi-Wan said, and ah, hell, it hurt. “His name was Xan. They were together for almost four years. There was someone before Xan, and someone before them. Every few years, as the professor’s interest wanders, he tries out a new model. Whatever you think you know about Qui-Gon’s affections, take them with a grain of salt, hmm? He’s returned the others to the lot, in time, and it’ll be the same with me.”

Anakin’s expression was a bruise, a deep-seated sort of hurt. “You don’t know that for sure.”

“Yes, I do.” He tried to smile. “I was here, and I threw myself at him. I didn’t give him much choice but to decide that I’d do.”

“Jesus, Obi-Wan."

“What? I don’t harbor any illusions about myself, Anakin. I may be what the professor wants now, but it won’t last. It can’t. It’s inevitable; he’ll find somebody else.”

“That’s what you meant last night, isn’t it? When you said that if I’d been here, he wouldn’t have taken up with you.”

The anger in his voice took Obi-Wan aback. “Well, yes.”

“Shows how much you fucking know. You’re wrong. You’re goddamn wrong, Obi-Wan, you know that? Because you know what? We had a thing last summer, him and me. I wanted him and he took me and we had a real good time after that.”

“You--?” There were words in Obi-Wan’s throat somewhere, but the sudden fist in his gut held them back. “You what?

“I went to bed with him, for fuck’s sake. How the hell else would I have seen your picture, huh? How would have I known about you? It’s not like he talked about you in class. He kept his picture right next to his bed, and after the first time that he screwed me, I asked about you. And do you know what he said, Obi-Wan? Huh?”

He could not breathe. He couldn’t move. “What?”

“He said, _that’s the love of my life_.” Anakin touched his face. “And he meant it, too.”

A bright line of blue sky after a storm; that’s what those words felt like, imagining them in Qui-Gon’s low, sated voice. No. He remembered finding some of Xan’s books in the professor’s study, an affectionate note tucked between them scrawled in the professor’s own hand--there had been love in that, surely. Xan had probably let himself believe that. But he was gone now, as were all those that had come before. How could Obi-Wan let himself believe that he was any different? If there was one lesson the Greeks had taught him, it was that history repeated, no matter how firmly one resisted; no matter how hard one fought, in the end, no one could fight their fate.

And surely Anakin was a sign of that, yes? A portent of what was to come. A reminder from the gods that the way this story ended had already been written, no matter what Anakin thought.

“He loves me,” Obi-Wan said sourly. “Right. Which was why he was fucking you.”

“Maybe he was doing his thing, like you said, falling back into his old pattern, looking for the next model or something. But when he did, all he figured out, you dumb bastard, was that he might’ve liked fucking me but he fucking loves you.”

“Stop it. Stop saying that! You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

Anakin made a frustrated noise and caught Obi-Wan by the collar. “Is it really so hard for you to believe that he cares about you? Huh? You love him, don’t you, and we’ve been in bed all day. Does that mean you care about him any less?”

“No, but--”

“Shut up!” Anakin barked. “It isn’t my fault you refuse to believe it just because it doesn’t match some bullshit story you’ve told yourself. Jesus, Obi-Wan. Stop trying so hard to make yourself a martyr.”

A snarl tore from him. He clawed at Anakin’s hip, trying to hold him close, trying to push him away. “Stop fucking talking, Anakin!”

Anakin got right in his face, his eyes a bloody maelstrom. “Fuck you. Make me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How in the hell has this thing gotten so lengthy? Good lord. Apologies.


	11. Chapter 11

“No,” Obi-Wan cried. “No. No!”

He pushed Anakin away harder than he’d meant to and Anakin lost his balance and fell back, upsetting the coffee table and landing on his ass to the sound of breaking glass and then it was quiet, painfully so, the only noise the quick draw of Obi-Wan’s heart and the surprised hitch in Anakin’s breath.

Obi-Wan blinked hard, feeling the beating wings of fast approaching, his hands curled into the cushions. “I can’t talk about this anymore, Anakin. I can’t. Not right now. It’s too much.”

Anakin stared up at him. “All right.”

“Perhaps we could...perhaps you could go upstairs now. I’ll tidy up down here. Lock the doors, see to the cats, those sorts of things.”

“Do you want me to leave?” Anakin’s voice was beaten tin. “I will, if that’s what you want.”

It wasn’t; indeed, some part of Obi-Wan was afraid it would never be. Even now, as confusion and uncertainty swirled, the pleasure of Anakin’s presence, the whispered promise of its permanence, felt in his heart unquestionably clear. 

But there was too the familiar counterweight of Qui-Gon, a man he’d loved in vain for so long. A man he’d built a life with while acknowledging its tenuousness. A man he’d never allowed himself to believe could love him.

There were too many well-worn stories about his prowess, that was part of the problem; too many profs and fellow students who’d pulled him aside and murmured vaguely about Xan and before him, a long-haired free-spirit named Kit--in the end, when their studies were finished, the professor had found a way to cut ties. They’d each left Cambridge, so Obi-Wan had been told, with glowing recommendations and top tier jobs and thoroughly broken hearts.

 _Come now_ , these well-meaning interjectors seemed to say, their expressions drawn and quartered, _that can’t be what you want for yourself, is it? Take heed from us like Orestes’ Furies and steer away from the rocks that lie dead ahead_.

In time, Obi-Wan had come to decide that these comments sprung more from jealousy than concern--but it hadn’t been so easy, he understood now, to cut himself free from those insinuations; had they really blinded him, as Anakin seemed so certain, to the depth of Qui-Gon’s affections? Could he have been so absorbed in someone else’s story--Xan’s story, or Kit’s--that he’d so completely misunderstood his own?

And how in the bloody hell could a kid from the American nowhere see that when he couldn’t?

Leave? Oh, no. Anakin couldn’t, not now.

He said:

“I don’t want you to leave. Please don’t.”

He felt Anakin’s hand curl around his ankle, saw the dark clouds on the boy’s face lift a little, enough to let in a hint of the sun. “Ok,” he said. “I won’t.”

Obi-Wan stretched out his fingers and cupped Anakin’s jaw and Anakin’s eyes lowered, his mouth softening, as he leaned into Obi-Wan’s gentle hold.

“Go upstairs,” Obi-Wan said. “Go to bed. I need some time to myself, hmm? To clean up the mess that I’ve made of this, and to think.”

Anakin nuzzled his hand. “You coming up later, maybe?”

“Maybe. I don’t know yet.” He bent down and drew Anakin’s face up and kissed the kid’s forehead. “Don’t wait up for me,” he said quietly. “If you want to sleep, sleep.”

“Can I kiss you?” 

“Not right now. Later, all right?”

“Mmmm,” Anakin sighed, warm against Obi-Wan’s cheek. “Ok.”


End file.
